Google Ad Words

Increasing an AdWords quality score can sometimes be an exercise in frustration and one where you really feel like you are beating your head against the wall. We use a number of methodologies within AdWords and on the destination site for increasing AdWords Quality Score.

Be very specific

As we have written about before, when people search, they search with intent. They are looking for something very specific so you want to capture that search either organically or with AdWords. However, what we have seen when we start to audit client's AdWords account is a hodgepodge of words that can be very broad. For example if someone selling golf lessons buys the keyword golf, his ad will show up for searches like golf courses. Because the ad gets so many impressions, the click through rate will be very low, and anything less than 1% will drive your quality score down. 

So for keywords, you need to pick keywords very specifically around what you sell. We typically will use something called a modifier and pair it with a negative keyword list to get very specific results. A modifier for golf lessons would be written like this +golf +lessons, so when someone Googles Princeton NJ golf lessons, our ad appears. If you use a modifier, it's imperative you use a negative keyword list to limit your searches as any combination of golf lessons will trigger the ad. For example, you would want to use negative keywords like bad so when someone Google bad golf lessons, your ad doesn't appear. Recently, we started a new campaign on Google AdWords for social media marketing agency, our keyword modifier looks like this: 

For each product we offer, we recommend setting up one Ad Group with no more than 4 keyword modifiers. This will keep the ads tight and relevant.

Use Keywords within the ads

Now that you have your keywords set, it's time to create an ad. Similiar to modifiers within AdWords, we use something called Keyword Insertion within our ads to make them more relevant to what people just Googled. Let's say someone Google NYC Golf Lessons. Our ad is written like this.

Top {Keyword: Golf Lesson}

Reduce Strokes in a month

Email or call us to start!

To the user, due to keyword insertion, the ad they will see will look like this:

Top NYC Golf Lessons

Reduce Strokes in a month

Email or call us to start

This makes the ad much more relevant to the user which will directly effect the quality score of the keyword and indirectly if the click through rate is high. In order to increase our click through rate for social media marketing agency, we used keyword insertion that looks like this: 

Use Multiple Landing Page

Once an ad campaign is created, it's very important for the landing page the person is being directed to be what they are looking for. This means that the keywords you have in Google must be on the webpage you are directing them. Imagine having a yellow pages ad under painting, and the ad is for travel, this is why your landing page should be what the person is looking for. Once your ad starts, Google will start to measure. If your landing page has a high bounce rate, then Google will decrease your quality score. If your page has a low bounce rate, Google will raise your score.

Lastly, one thing you can do is experiment with multiple landing pages. Recently we added landing pages on our site for ad campaigns around social media agency and content marketing agency that direct people to pages tailored for those keywords specifically rather than our more general product pages.

Analyze

One of the last things we tell people is they need to be patient. It's going to take Google some amount of time to increase and decrease quality scores based on your history. Some keywords that are not super competitive will change faster, while others will change slower. You should check once a week on your keywords and pause or delete any keyword with a quality score less than two and a click through rate less than 1 %.

One question we get a lot from our prospects, is how long does it take to get on Google? It's legitimate question because while 82.6% of Internet users use search, most people don't quite understand how it works. 

With that in mind, we always feel it's a good practice to level set our customers and prospects on how long it will take to get on Google.

When people ask about getting on Google they refer mostly to the SEO piece. How long will it take for Google to index my website? The answer is usually a couple of days but this is a shallow answer because you won't rank for anything but your website's name. For example if your website is named Joe's Bag of Doughnuts Shop, and you sell doughnut, you will probably get on Google for your brand name "Joe's Bag of Doughnuts Shop" but won't rank very highly for doughnut shop. Why? Because unless you are in an area with no other doughnut shops, you will face competition from other shops. Therefore to rank higher and get on Google for more search terms like doughnut shop or Joe's Bag, you will need to get more websites to link to you and more content that uses those search terms. This can be done through a blog and social media. With some amount of diligence about writing a blog and posting it to Social media, it usually takes 3-6 months to start to rank for a number of keywords that will drive good traffic to your website.

So how long does it take to get on Google? About 3-6 months for a critical mass of keywords.

If you don't have 3-6 months, another excellent way to get on Google is to use Google AdWords. However, while you can start getting traffic from Google withing about 20 minutes of putting a campaign up in AdWords, it's advisable to let the campaign run for 30 continuous days to give Google's algorithms enough information about your site to optimize your campaign. These campaigns, can be expensive to the tune of thousands of dollars.

So if you are patient, we always recommend using SEO to get on Google, but if you need to make a splash immediately and get on google quickly, AdWords, though expensive can really kick things off.

One critical definition in someone's education in digital marketing is the difference between CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per thousand). 

• Cost-per-click or CPC is how Google charges people for AdWords. The way it works is that all impressions are free, but any time anyone clicks on an ad, Google charges you or that click. Other companies that use this are Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Cost-per thousand or CPM is the traditional way people have bought magazine ads for years. For example if a magazine has a circulation of 1,000,000 and their CPM is $2.00 then the cost of the actual ad buy is 1,000,000 divided by 1,000 multiplied by $2.00. This is used today on Facebook, LinkedIn and Paid Banner Ads.

Depending on your marketing goals, both can be useful. Typically for people trying to build brand awareness, using a CPM makes more sense, while people looking for targeted leads, a CPC model is better. Some other people will use CPM as a way to drive down their CPC cost. For example if someone writes a great ad, it may be more beneficial to use a cheap CPM bid than CPC because your conversion rate is so high.

Whenever you run a marketing campaign, the very fist thing you should think about is the goal and this goal should be one of the following:

1. How much revenue am I generating off this ad campaign?
2. How many leads have I generated? 

Once this is understood, you need to look at your website and understand if you have at least one of these conversions installed. If you don't there's no reason to run the ad because you will simply be putting money into a black hole with no way of understanding what's working and what's not. Once the conversion event is set-up such as a consumer checkout or a contact us web form, you need to direct the software to redirect to a thank you page. The thank you page will say something like "thanks" for the order or "thanks, we will contact you in 24 hours". This thank you page is called a goal conversion page. 

Both Bing and AdWords offer the ability to set up conversion goals. Since AdWords counts for most search advertising, it makes sense to look at setting up conversion goals on AdWords. If you can set it up for AdWords, Bing setup is pretty similar. For AdWords, you log into you account and land on the home page and the process goes like this:

1. Click on Reporting and tools and select Conversions
2. Click on New Conversion
3. A box will appear called name. Here you enter something like "Bought from store" or "Filled out Contact Form"
4. Click Save and Continue
5. You will now appear on the Settings page
6. Choose a conversion type such as Lead or Purchase
7. Unless you are doing the code yourself and know what you are doing you can choose other option, otherwise ignore the rest and click save and continue
8. You will now appear on the Generate Code page
9. If you are going to make the changes yourself then click on "I make changes myself" if you don't manage the website then click on "Someone else makes changes to the code". The first option generates a piece of code for you to install, while second generates the same code but as an email to send your webmaster.
10. Install code or have someone install code on your thank you page.

Once you have this conversion code in place you can start tracking different advertisements in Google and Bing and be able to see what give you the most ROI. Knowing this one stat will not only save you money but identify those opportunities that are making the most money for you and seizing them.